


New Growth

by Eithe



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-19
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 08:57:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5242364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eithe/pseuds/Eithe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of Trespasser, Lavellan paints, and heals, and works some things out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Growth

**Author's Note:**

> This whole thing started because I read a short fic on tumblr (since mislaid) that talked about statues of Lavellan and Solas reaching for each other. That image - reaching but not touching - stuck in my head. As I am wont to do when an image sticks in my head, I started drawing. The picture came first, but I realized how much I was learning about my Lavellan from what she considered important enough to include - and then, because most of my creative endeavors are less 'a thing I set out to do' and more 'a thing that happens to me,' fic happened also.

Plaster over the stones in preparation for paint. Not fresco, though. She doesn’t have the skill or the confidence for that medium.

She can’t do what Solas did.

Does, she reminds herself. He’s not dead. Just gone.

She hopes, wherever he is, he’s still painting. So many of her memories of him involve stolen moments of reflection, followed by a flurry of purposeful work. Conviction in every stroke, because the forms were planned out in advance.

That he is the Dread Wolf is surprising, but not incompatible with what she already knew. It fits with what she suspected, even if expectation blinded her to that particular conclusion. The idea of him not making art, though, is alien and somehow horrific. It’s a part of him.

She nearly laughs at that thought, glancing down at her pinned-up left sleeve. Her eyes skitter away. It still drops the bottom out of her stomach if she looks for more than half a heartbeat. But his art is like that, she thinks; integral.

She hopes he isn’t tormenting himself. Suspects that he is. Suspects that, at least at first, wherever he finds himself will be spare and empty and largely unadorned, even if there is no way it could remain so.

He can’t help but try to make things better, try to make them beautiful. She thinks of the final fresco in the rotunda, the plaster dried unpigmented, ruined. It hurts to look at it. So much effort, so much artistry, marred by what happened at the end.

It seems like that’s a recurring theme in his life.

Not something she’ll be imitating, even on accident. Not in this, at least. She can’t do what he does - or did, if he’s denying himself the joy and relief of art while walking the din’anshiral. Fresco is a craft, honed through years of patient practice. It is not a forgiving master. Paint, though - that, she can manage. Paint is an old friend.

The Dalish love beauty every inch as much as their ancestors. They have not been able to retain all of their arts, but much of the artistry still survives. The realities of Clan life require the beauty they create to be something they can carry with them. They’ve lost colossal statuary and grand architecture. They’ve gained the intricate complexity of an aravel’s dozen decorative sails, though, and the necessities of their nomadic lives are rarely left unadorned unless the simplicity in and of itself is the source of their beauty. They carve and weave and embroider.

They paint.

Her father wears June’s marks. Most would say it was for his sure hands and the steady certainty that saw new aravels constructed in the safety of summer pasture, but his first and favorite love has always been decorated pottery. Before any of the family suspected that she’d inherited her Keeper grandmother’s gift, her father showed her the more subtle magic that can be achieved with glazes and pigment. He is a master of his craft, of course, and she wasn’t even a stumbling apprentice when the magic set her feet on a different path entirely. She is long out of practice. But her father taught her the basics. He taught her that beauty will flow from sweeping and confident gestures, so long as she is willing to own the mistakes, too. Even a modest level of skill is enough, so long as she is patient and persistent.

She makes use of the tools her life has given her. If there is a quiet ache for the lost arts, well, there is also a comfort in the familiarity of her people’s art. Comfort, too, in the vastly more forgiving medium and materials. There is no need for haste, with paint. She can work in layers. She can come back and make alterations as needed.

She has more time.

She can jigsaw the work in around her other obligations - there are plenty even now. Disbanding, as it turns out, involves quite a bit of work beyond simply declaring it so. On top of that, there’s learning to function with one hand, discussing with Dagna the possibilities for a prosthetic, sending the half dozen agents she would truly trust with her life out to hunt for her heart, prying into what she can of his plans and hindering (or helping - it’s hard to say which it truly is, when he all but asked her to stop him) as much as she can, with her diminished reach.

She’ll stop making puns about it when she can give her arm serious thought without wanting to retch.

The mural is slow work. It would be even if it weren’t done in fits and spurts, when she finds the time. It has been years since she did anything more involved or artistic than roughing out a map or sketching in the margins of her notes during yet another interminable meeting.

She’s rusty. Yet another reason it’s in her quarters; it gives her the illusion that no one else will see until she’s ready. Only the illusion, of course. She does not have true privacy even here.

That’s part of the point, though, even when she’s uncomfortable with the idea of anyone seeing her amateurish fumbling and comparing it with what Solas created.

She keeps making changes. Keeps adding more pigment, keeps scraping away days worth of work so she can try again and get it right.

It starts out comparatively small, in the center of a wall. Two figures, simultaneously reaching towards and turning away from each other. It starts as an attempt to work things out inside her own head. Farewells and hesitancy and not really letting go. Reaching out and entreaty and being unable to follow.

It’s a moot point, of course, since he doesn’t want her to go with him. Even if he were willing to let her help, she couldn’t; she’s still a Keeper, even if her motley clan has scattered to the winds. She’s still being called on for aid or arbitration, even as the news spreads that the Inquisition is no more.

It’s not sustainable. Eventually she will leave Skyhold. She will have to; it is too well-known. She needs to be able to move, if not in secret, at least more quietly.

And this place is his, however much she might have made it hers, too. It was his, first, and it was his longer, and that knowledge sits uneasily under her skin like a shiver just-surfacing.

She will leave. But not yet.

She paints; hands, reaching out but never touching. She roughs out the shape of her left arm, too, even though that’s ridiculous. She still doesn’t quite see herself without it, though. It’s just another way her work lacks the certainty of his, but at least she isn’t racing against the time limit of drying plaster.

It’s not done, doesn’t have to be.

She’ll get there.

\--- 

She spends a long time staring at the mural - at his face and her own - before she makes a decision. She doesn’t render her eyes, just shadows in the space to suggest features. She doesn’t know how else to show what she knows but can’t quite comprehend. Somehow, the ancients were more, or more able to see. There is a difference so profound that Solas saw everyone else as shadows rather than people. It still stings, even though he acknowledged that he was wrong.

For him to have ever thought it at all, there must be a difference. So she shows it, or tries to.

She takes cues from the style of his frescoes, but it’s still very different. She spends too long worrying. His medium meant that he didn’t have time to do so, once he started laying in color. He had a plan. She has… vague ambitions.

She keeps coming back, nudging, pushing, trying to get it right, and the paint spreads, and spreads, and spreads, until she’s covered the whole wall.

He’s turned to the left, towards the past. She shows everything she knows of that world, little as it is. She knows it was beautiful. Orderly, full of magic and ease - at least for some. They had the time and luxury to build beautiful things. It seems alien to her, though, and cold. The Vir Dirthara was a wonder, but even being able to feel each other’s memories doesn’t seem to have given them empathy.

Behind her own figure, she tries to show the vibrancy of the forests she’s always loved best. She adds in the barest suggestion of an aravel before realizing that the ceiling is in the way; it wouldn’t look right, cramped under eaves instead of unfurled against the sky. That’s not important, though, not really. Clan Lavellan is still entirely itself, even after two years behind city walls.

She starts painting her family, instead.

\--- 

She takes her time, lingers over familiar faces. They’re what she’s fighting for. They’ve always been what she’s fighting for.

She’s fought for other clans, for her people in the cities under human rule, for mages, for the poor and the suffering and, by some measures, for everyone in Thedas - but before she was anyone at all, she fought for her family.

She paints a babe in Sulahn’s arms, though he is no longer a swaddled infant, two years on. Motherhood suits her cousin. Her father, her mother, her brother. She puts the finishing touches on her brother’s bare face and smiles a little. They match again. Unlike everyone else, he hadn’t asked what happened to her vallaslin, hadn’t been shocked or disturbed. He’d just been happy they were the same once more. She presses a kiss to her forefingers, brushes them against his forehead. She’ll see him again when she leaves. Maybe not right away, but even if everything else goes wrong, even if she fails and the world burns, she’ll be able to go home to the people she loves, who love her.

She isn’t alone.

\--- 

She isn’t alone, and looking at the unpopulated left side of her mural, she realizes it’s unfair. She’s painted her family, the people she’s fighting for. She doesn’t know his people well enough to paint individuals, but she knows that they exist. He isn’t fighting to restore an empty world.

She does her best to aproximate, patterns figures based on Mythal’s Sentinels. Perhaps they aren’t a representative sample, but they’re all she’s seen of the ancient Elvhen. She vacillates over whether or not to include their vallaslin, and decides not. She knows what it meant, what it still means to him. He isn’t fighting for a return to exactly what was. He saw the injustices. He wouldn’t reinstate them.

It still looks empty, after. Not by design, although she would admit - if pressed - that she thinks of it that way. There is another group he’s fighting for, though. She should include them, too.

She layers in the suggestion of a spirit and hopes, again, that there will be some middle path; some way to serve and protect both of their peoples without too much cost to either, some way to restore some of what was lost without destroying everything that is. She doesn’t want to be party to the continued suffering of an entire people that she still barely understands.

But she looks across at the painted figures of her family, at the infant in her cousin’s arms, and realizes that if it comes down to it, yes, she will go to war against the man she loves to ensure that child will have a future. It would tear her in half, but she would do it.

She’s never been much for prayer - never believed anyone could hear - but the stories all say that the Creators could. The records of Vir Dirthara made that sound like more than myth. Solas seems at least that powerful, now - and even if the words don’t reach him, it’s possible that her feelings are strong enough to persuade a spirit to carry the message for her.

“Please,” she whispers, begs, “give us a chance. Let me find another way.”

She has always wanted to understand everything, but there’s an urgency to it, now. It’s not simple desire. It’s necessity. Finding another way, making him see it, too - that isn’t something she wants. It’s something she needs.

She thinks wistfully of days when she had others to help her look for answers. Perhaps the worst thing about her current situation is how isolated she’s starting to feel. Her friends have scattered, her Clan is across the sea, and the castle is emptying as people gather their things and head home.

\--- 

When she can’t stand being surrounded by walls and empty space anymore, she takes a trip to spend some time in the forest. Because she has terrible luck, it is the exact opposite of peaceful. Her hart screams a warning, and a tree tries to rake her with sharpened talons.

A sylvan. Of course. Why wouldn’t she encounter a malevolent spirit possessing a tree? There’s a reason Varric’s novelization of the last few years of her life took comparatively little embellishment and still merited the title ‘This Shit Is Weird.’

Fire is the obvious choice, confronted with such a creature, but she prefers to play to her strengths. Also, she’d prefer not to inadvertently torch the whole forest.

A frost spell sucks the moisture out of the wood and coats the thing with ice. The spirit inside screams in rage and slashes at her again with what really do look remarkably like clawed hands, but the shell of ice slows it. She gets a barrier up.

Her hart is not pleased, and she can feel him tensing to bolt and carry them both to safety, but - no. She’s not leaving this thing here for someone else to stumble across. The next traveler most likely won’t have spells. The next traveler most likely won’t have the luxury of fleeing on swift hooves.

“Atisha, falon.”

He heeds her. They aren’t in too much trouble, yet. She draws on the cold for a lattice of frost strengthen her shield as the sylvan thrashes and claws its way out of the ice. The reinforcement won’t last, but doesn’t need to.

The sylvan is clawing at her barrier in earnest, like a predator trying to dig out its next meal. Her hart blows out a breath and lowers his horns and - that is a terrible idea. She grits her teeth and reaches up, wrests a bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky, and yanks it down to strike wood that’s now tinder-dry, thanks to the desiccating effects of the freeze.

It explodes. Her hart manages to contain a startled sideways leap that might have unseated her into a quick skipping step. The pieces of the sylvan smolder.

It’s oddly satisfying.

The left half of the torso landed nearer than the other pieces. She douses the flames nibbling along the ribcage - the approximation of a ribcage - and considers.

She brings it home. Dagna makes thoughtful noises, when she outlines what she wants, and says it should work.

She’s exhausted, but before she goes to sleep, she gives her mural-self a left arm made of living branches. It’s probably premature, but she’s feeling oddly optimistic. Enough so to ignore the traditional admonishments about chickens and counting. Her clan never kept hens, anyway.

\--- 

It occurs to her, later, that perhaps she should have drawn other races. Thedas is more than elves, even if most of her life hasn’t been. The people she painted behind her are people Solas has never met. He knows Cassandra and Varric, Cole, Dorian, Blackwall and Sera, Bull, Vivienne. He knows her family only through stories. She spoke of them often, though rarely in depth - scattered mentions and the occasional anecdote that was amusing even without the deeper context of knowing and loving the participants.

But she isn’t trying to show him that this world and those in it are worth something. He knows that already. She’s not even sure that he’ll see this - for all Tarasyl’an Te’las is his, she’s not entirely certain he’ll come back, not with how hard he’s been to find even in the Fade. Skyhold is many things, but it is not hidden or discreet. She intends to leave, but it doesn’t automatically follow that he’ll return. Painting has been mostly about working things out for herself, though. She is asking him to come home to her. That means her family, for her; she loves them, she loves him, and she wants him to be a _part_ of her family. The outstretched hand is an invitation as well as an entreaty, and it’s not just asking him into the world she lives in.

She finally realizes that she is essentially proposing by way of a painting he’ll only see if he’s still spying on her, and may not understand even if he is. She pulls her paintbrush away from the wall before she does any damage, but her laughter feels like it’s made of broken glass and is dangerously close to tipping into tears. She shoves the thorned tangle of her feelings down and leaves her room for the first time that day.

If she thinks about it any further, she’ll want to scrape the whole wall clean. She’s going to spend some time in the garden, instead. The Dragonthorn is still sleepily protesting the mountain cold, but she thinks she’s worked out a combination of compost and runes that will encourage it along.

\--- 

She and Josephine spend a day answering correspondence that requires a personal response from the Inquisitor, even if that isn’t who she is anymore. So many people have tried to insist that she’ll be the Herald until she dies, and she wants to laugh at all of them. She never was the Herald. She’s only ever been herself, and she’s given back the power bound up in the only official title she held. She isn’t the Inquisitor any longer.

She doesn’t want to be Ameridan, to fight at someone else’s behest until her friends are dead and she’s sacrificed to the needs of strangers. She’ll spend her life on those she loves, instead. Maybe it looks the same, from the outside; she’s still trying to save the world, still doing her best, still trying to stop or stall Solas’s plans.

It feels different from the inside, though.

The following day, she pleads fatigue and keeps to her quarters, where she lies belly-down on the cold stone floor and paints plants. This much is comfortably familiar; her father trusted her to paint backgrounds, if very little else. It’s mindless and soothing. Leaf, breathe out the desire to summon a windstorm to carry paperwork halfway to Rivain. Flower, breathe in snow-touched mountain air and let it cool your temper. Eventually the desire to destroy things or throw the most obsequious Orlesian messenger off the battlements mostly subside.

She keeps painting flowers. Someday, maybe more of her life will be this simple.

Eventually, her back protests the position. She rises, stretching out the kinks along her spine and rotating her wrist. Looks at the right side of the wall and considers.

The bare branches of the trees feel like a taunt. She goes to get a stool to stand on so that she can keep layering greenery overhead, as well; she’s sick of sterile stone and she’s done being polite about the restraint required of her for so long. It’s not required anymore. She ends up with paint - green and brown and gold and everything between - liberally spattering her clothes and probably smudged across her skin and in her hair, and feels much better about life.

She’s not a tame creature. She never has been, and she’s done pretending to be so for the comfort of others.

\--- 

Looking at the mural once it’s taken shape is… uncomfortable. She’s been called heathen, savage, beast - there are a lot of uncomplimentary names hurled at the Dalish, and she’s heard all of them often enough to get used to it, enough that the words have become nearly meaningless. She’s never felt like any of those things. It helps that the words never touched her when she was young and soft and could have taken an impression from them, that she never respected anyone who would use them in the first place. By the time they reached her ears, she knew who she was and knew those speaking them were small and cruel and wrong.

Still; she knows Elvhenan was beautiful and full of magic. That their ancestors wrought wonders. She has shaded in the barest suggestion of that, because she does not - perhaps cannot - know what it was like. What it might be like again, if he succeeds. She knows what her life was like. Her life was hills and woods and the ruins that remained, walking the world to keep separate and safe. It’s so different from everything he’s lost. He spoke of his people making a life for themselves, but it has always been perfectly clear that he does not consider the Dalish adaptation of elven culture to be even a bastard descendant of Elvhenan, let alone a worthy successor.

It is entirely possible that he could never be happy in the life she loved, or even with the changes now rippling out across the Marches from Wycome.

And yet, what they are now grew from the roots of what his people were, after the tree had been cut down and the second growth burned. They are growing, still, and it frustrates her every time that he does not want to see what they could become because it is less beautiful than that first growth.

She does understand, though, a little. He can admire what has been accomplished by the humans or the Avvar or the dwarves because they’re farther removed from what he lived. The world they lost when Elvhenan shattered was inextricably tied with what it meant to _be_ elven, for him.

It makes sense. She still wants to shake him for it. He should not have expected the same thing to grow after so much was destroyed. He should have expected scars.

Maybe he did. Maybe what hurts is that anything survived at all; he feels guilty for what was lost, but he might feel worse at what survived and how.

She reaches up to touch the abstracted representation of his face. It’s gold stone, beneath the paint, and she turns away. She needs to touch something warm.

Her hart greets her with a gust of sweet, hay-scented breath when she lets herself into his stall. She rests her brow against his broad forehead and lets her eyes fall closed.

“We’ll leave soon,” she tells him.

It’s time to go, but she’s not quite ready yet.

\--- 

Cole has crossed into the Fade, but it means it’s easy for him to reach her in her sleep, means he knows when she needs him. He comes to her that night and says, “He doesn’t think of it like that, not anymore. You aren’t less than, you couldn’t be; brief, bright, beloved. There’s no comparison, no competition, but this is the cost. Can’t say but can’t silence; prove me wrong again.”

“I know,” she says, because she does; Solas wants to be wrong and trusts her to stop him when he needs to be stopped. It’s a lot to put on one person. It’s a lot to ask, even though she’s willing and wants to.

She’s still not quite sure how to feel about his asking at all.

“I am not his self-control or his conscience.”

The main problem with meeting in dreams is that it’s so much harder to curb her tongue. She doesn’t quite mean to say it. Can’t quite regret that she has.

Cole shakes his head. “Hearts are for following.”

“Is that what I am?”

“Vhenan. My heart. He told you so. Did you not believe him?”

She believed him when he said it, every time. But she also remembers being relegated to ‘Inquisitor.’ Remembers cool aloofness and silence. Remembers him walking away. She had two years to nurse that pain. It was worse, maybe, because she knew too much to be truly furious, to let rage burn away what came before. So the pain rooted and grew and wove through her like ivy, breaking things apart. Half an hour trading truths in a ruin has barely started the work of cutting it back. He called her his heart again, called her love - but he also turned his back again. He’s done that too often.

“Oh. You believe both. But they can’t both be true.”

“No,” she agrees. Now it’s a matter of pruning back her pain and seeing if, underneath that, her love is still structurally sound. It takes work, and she’s willing to work at it again, but she’s been afraid to look at the damage too closely.

She wants to believe he loves her. She knows he doesn’t want to.

“He does, though,” Cole says. “He couldn’t look any longer or he’d have stayed. He wanted to stay. He keeps his distance but can’t keep away. He doesn’t think he deserves good things, but he wants them. He wants to love you. He doesn’t think he’s allowed.”

“He’s an idiot.” She doesn’t quite mean it. Can’t mean it. Is only mildly annoyed by her inability to stay angry. Enjoys the feeling of the vines loosening and falling away. She doesn’t know when they grew thorns. It’s nice to breathe without them.

Cole shrugs. “He isn’t ready to listen.”

She thinks of the mural and her mouth tugs up, unbidden.

“Do you think he might be ready to see?”

Cole catches the thought and smiles, and she knows - Solas will see it. Maybe not yet. Maybe he won’t understand everything she was trying to say.

But he’ll see.

\---

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
